[Plugin: WP Biographia] Ouch! Update Deleted All User Avatars

Ouch indeed. But I’m not sure what you mean. The avatars are actually WordPress Gravatars and can’t (as far as I’m aware) be deleted from within a WordPress plugin.

But something’s not right. Can you check on gravatar.com that the user’s avatars are still there and that avatar support is enabled in the dashboard under Discussions?

Just following up on this I’ve installed v1.0 on a clean WordPress install locally and after configuring it I upgraded to v2.0.

While I haven’t seen any deletion of avatars I have seen that some of the plugin configuration settings are not as they were prior to the upgrade. This may be due to the changes made in v2.0 where more configurations were added. It’s also, at least as far as I know, impossible to check an automatic upgrade without pushing a new version to the WordPress repository and trying it out for real. Hmm.

Could I ask that you either repeat my experiment on your local machine or upgrade again and this time check the configuration settings and explicitly save them?

I’m really interested in seeing what the story is here and getting to the bottom of this.

We use the ‘User Avatar’ plugin to upload individual avatars (as opposed to forcing our users to create a Gravatar).

As this is the case, we will not be able to do any replication testing today, as our time will be spent re-uploading individual avatars.

We will also look over the settings, but as the upgrade has already been applied, we have nothing to compare it to in regard to our previous settings.

Update: This was totally user error on our part.

Somehow the ‘User Avatar’ plugin we use to upload avatars (as opposed to using Gravatars) got updated to a version which is not compatible with our current installation along with the WP Biographia plugin.

Please feel free to close / delete this thread.

Thx!

-Brian & WR

Thanks for the quick reply … I’m assuming the User Avatar plugin you’re using is this one? If so, then I hold my hands up and admit that I’ve not come across this plugin before and as a result not been able to do any compatibility testing.

My plugin certainly adds to the fields available as part of a user’s profile but from looking at my code I can’t see how the two plugins would interact in such a way as to either delete the avatars or to remove any references to them.

From a quick look at the User Avatar plugin, can you tell whether the avatars are still present in /wp-content/uploads/avatars?

Also, while there doesn’t appear to be a clash between any hooks that the two plugins register, it’s interesting that the User Avatar installs a filter to override the default get_avatar() function to plug the user uploaded images in instead of using the Gravatar, but even then I can’t see why you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing.

Hmmm … more homework and investigation needed here I think.

Oh. While I was writing my last post, you posted this …

Update: This was totally user error on our part.

Somehow the ‘User Avatar’ plugin we use to upload avatars (as opposed to using Gravatars) got updated to a version which is not compatible with our current installation along with the WP Biographia plugin.

Please feel free to close / delete this thread.

… messages passing each other over the inter-webs.

So does this mean that the upgrade didn’t bork your installation?

Indeed, the plugin referenced in your comment is correct.

There really is no clash between the two, it is just that the most current version of ‘User Avatar’ does not play well with our site (ie, it prevents uploaded avatars from appearing).

Once we’ve reverted back to the previous version all the avatars re-appeared. Voila!

The WP Biographia upgrade was indeed successful. However, it seems as though the previous settings were not carried over as mentioned in your earlier post. This would be a nice feature for future upgrades.

Thx!

Phew. It’s just gone midnight here in the UK and I can now slope off to bed without the need to burn the midnight oil trying to track a bug down and fix it. I’ve learnt a lot about plugins over the last few months and the upgrade of the configuration settings is one thing I need to make sure goes into v2.0.1 of WP Biographia.

Thanks for the really quick replies to this; it’s really much appreciated that you took the time to get back to me rather than thinking “meh” and deleting the plugin!